The Shop (32 page)

Feeling her way through the tunnel, Jolie kept the H & K semiauto at her side. She would have to allow for the long sound suppressor screwed onto the barrel. Fortunately, the sights on the USP were raised to go with a silencer.

Abruptly, she was aware of cool air blowing in her way.

From a door opening and closing?

She waited, listening for something—anything. Footsteps, breathing, the sound of rubbing clothing. Nothing.

But with her eyes adjusted, she could see a mass of darkness inside the larger darkness. Familiar—at least she thought it was familiar. The shape. She held up her flashlight—left hand—and pointed the H & K with her right. “Who’s there?”

“It’s me, Cyril.”

Her legs were rubbery. “Cyril.”

“Don’t whisper,” he said. “Talk. But keep it low.”

“Are they out there?”

“Yes. Pretty soon they’ll look in the tunnel. You might be able to get them on the Hinckley.”

“What about the helicopter? Wouldn’t they shoot at us?”

“I can divert them.”

Jolie said nothing. He would help her or he wouldn’t. As glad as she was that he was here, she reminded herself that they had different goals. He wanted to kill Mike Cardamone. He also wanted to kill her uncle, Franklin. He didn’t give a rat’s ass about the rest of the people here. She needed to keep that in mind.

They straggled up to the boathouse.

Cyril left them.

“What’s he doing?” demanded Riley.

“Making sure it’s safe for us to go,” Jolie said.

Riley leaned against her father, and Franklin gently ran his fingers through her hair. He looked beaten down. He mourned Grace, but it was even more than that. Jolie sensed he knew he was not getting out of this alive.

She wanted to tell him she would get them all out of here. But the words stuck in her throat. She wasn’t so sure. She felt—it was a very strong feeling—that Franklin was doomed.

You don’t know that
.

Jolie looked at Frank, the way he kept running his hand over his daughter’s hair. The way he stared into space, seeing nothing. As if the only thing holding him to earth was the repetitive movement of his hand on his daughter’s hair.

Jolie had never really given much credence to blood ties. In fact, she’d despised her mother’s side of the family. But now she realized that the Haddoxes, for all their wealth, all their power, all their connections, were just people who made mistakes. They were a mixture of good and bad and smart and stupid like everybody else. Like her, they were trapped by their own circumstances. Wealthy, yes, but unhappy. She was surprised at how unhappy they were.

Her studious avoidance of the Haddoxes, her attempts to render them insignificant, had in fact yielded the opposite effect. Instead of reducing their influence on her life, she’d made them loom large. The Haddoxes defined her view of wealth and power and set her on the path of outsider. She had made them larger than they really were.

Their absence had shaped her—

Until she met Kay.

She looked at Kay, at Zoe. They too were silent, but they hadn’t disconnected. Behind Zoe’s eyes was a lively intelligence. The two of them were still here, still hopeful. Jolie felt a surge of pride. Kay
would
be that way.

“I’m sorry,” Franklin said to his daughter. “I’m so sorry for all of this.”

“I miss her so much!” Riley said.

Jolie had thought he didn’t really love his daughter, but now she saw otherwise. She thought Frank was stroking his daughter’s hair because he wanted that to be the memory he took with him. If he didn’t come out of this alive, he wanted his last moments to be real. He’d lost a wife today, but he still had Riley.

“Jolie,” Kay said.

“Yes?”

“Do you think we’re going to get out of here?”

Jolie lied. “Yes, I think we will.”

Their chances got a whole lot worse in the next few minutes. Cyril reached her by walkie-talkie with the news. “They disabled the Hinckley’s engine. There’s no way to fix it here.”

Jolie wondered if he was lying. She knew he wanted to keep control of them, particularly Franklin. But he’d likely tape them up and leave them—not play mind games.

“What now? You said they have a boat. Can’t we take that?”

“It’s possible.”

He sounded distracted. This bothered her even more, because she realized how much she depended on him. She had no way of understanding his motives, but she’d come to respect his ability.

She walked deeper into the tunnel so the others wouldn’t overhear. “What’s going on? Just what are we dealing with?”

He told her there could be as few as three left or as many as eight. This shocked her.

“Two of them are dead.”

Just two?

For perhaps the hundredth time, Jolie felt the same odd feeling that they were all disconnected from reality. “What now?”

“You have the sniper rifle?”

“I have it in the duffle.”

“Get it and set up where I tell you.”

“But what about—”

“Tell them to stay where they are. You said you were a sharpshooter, right?”

“I’m not a sniper.”

“Then you’re about to learn a new skill. No time like the present.”

She listened as he described the spot. She would be concealed, but on high enough ground where she could set up the rifle and shoot anyone who came in.

“What am I looking for?”

He told her.

“You’re sure?”

“It’s what I’d do.”

It took Jolie several minutes to get to the security center and retrieve the rifle and attach the sniper scope. “Rusty” wasn’t a good enough word for her ability with a sniper weapon. She’d only shot a sniper rifle twice—all her expertise was with a handgun. She took the H & K with her, too—sans the sound suppressor—and made her way to a slight raised mound in the garden, hidden from view by royal palms and the low-hanging branches of a magnolia tree. She crawled in and started to set up the tripod.

As she was doing so, her ears registered the drone of a helicopter.

She sighted on the helipad, not thirty-five meters away. The rain had abated a little, but the island was shrouded in a gray-green opaqueness—Jolie could barely see the white cross on the lawn.

The helicopter was kicking up a racket now, circling the island. Loud and low, menacing. Jolie wasn’t rattled. She brought herself down to the task at hand, looked through the scope, keeping the white-marked helipad in the crosshairs. Adjusting, a little higher. It would be nice to shoot the rotor, but she thought the easiest shot would be to get them as they emerged from the helo. Then they’d be sitting ducks.

For one second, the last vestiges of her law-and-order mindset rebelled. Then necessity shut it down.

The helicopter’s rotors were deafening.

Jolie concentrated her vision through the sight and kept as still as she could. Willed her heart to beat slower. Got in the zone. The way she did in the sharpshooter competitions. A kind of Zen.

He’d told her to shoot between heartbeats if possible.

So quiet in herself, she heard another sound, even under all the racket—a car engine. Her ears were now hypersensitive, as was every other part of her. She kept steady on the scope.
Breathe
. The helicopter hovered but didn’t touch down. She could see the chopper pilot through the window, headset ending in a comma at his mouth.

Then Jolie felt something zing past, split a leaf in two, and explosions of dirt all around her.

Someone was shooting at
her
.

Landry had half expected fire on Jolie’s position. He’d given her the second-best sniper position, hoped that whoever was left on the island would concentrate his fire on the obvious choice. But the man was thorough.

Thorough, but vulnerable.

The fire came from the hedge at the side of the main house, closest to the cabanas. Landry made his way around until he was behind the shooter.

He hoped Jolie had not panicked. If she lay flat on the ground and remained concealed, odds were good she would not be hit.

He’d planned to take the guy out quietly. Instead, he shot the man from a distance to keep him from killing Jolie. He understood this was an emotional thing—he wanted the cop to stay alive. Not the smartest thing he ever did.

Now he’d drawn attention to his location and had open space to cross.

He made it across and grabbed up the AR-15. The magazine was empty. The helo began to rise. The pilot had created the distraction and now was done.

Landry fired his own rifle at the helo but missed. He headed toward the causeway, staying hidden wherever he could.

Jolie clung to the ground like a limpet. Head down, eyes closed, like the ostrich with its head in the sand. Fire only raked the ground near her once, before she realized the majority of the fire rippled off to the left, twenty yards away.

No matter how terrifying an experience, no matter how great the fear that quicksilvered through your system and shattered everything in its path, it could not last for long. Abject terror could not sustain itself at that level forever. At first, when the fire raked her position, Jolie had flattened out and put her head down and prayed. She felt as if Edward Scissorhands was chopping his way around her. Finally she realized the danger was past, and the bullets were hitting elsewhere.